Building Peace S1 E3 – The Problem with Partnerships: Respect Local Experts

Nicoline: “you cannot sit somewhere around the world in your air-conditioned office and design a project and you expect me to copy and paste on the field... As if I were a robot.”
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Raaval: Welcome to The Problem with Partnerships, a Building Peace podcast series from Peace Direct.
I’m Raaval Singh Bains, your host for this series exploring how to decolonise the system of internation cooperation – that’s the humanitarian, development and peacebuilding sector.
We’re focusing on decolonising the partnerships between local activists and international NGOs and funders in the sector. To build better partnerships, we must address the problems holding us back – systemic racism, White Supremacy, and racialised power imbalances.
At Peace Direct, we believe local people are the experts in the conflicts that affect their communities, and only they understand what it takes to build peace that lasts. We believe peace initiatives should be designed and owned by these local experts, and that they should have the freedom to adapt these initiatives to the changing needs of the community that they work in.
Our sector is slowly coming around to this idea, but there are many organisations that still don’t respect local expertise, or trust local experts to lead.
Last year, we launched our guide to Transforming Partnerships in International Cooperation. It’s a tool for our sector to use to understand the problems undermining our partnerships, and to find concrete pathways towards more equitable and transformative relationships. The guide wasn’t based on our beliefs. It was based on several consultations with hundreds of people who shared their lived experiences of working in this sector.
Those local experts highlighted that they are often treated as contractors, or service providers, implementing short-term projects on behalf of international NGOs who don’t know the community’s unique needs. They are not respected or trusted. Their expertise is not valued.
Participants also identified that trust is one of the four key values absolutely essential for an equitable, decolonised partnership.
Nicoline: When we talk about trust, we are also talking about issues of mutual respect. When you don't trust me, it means you don't respect my capacity as a local expert.
Raaval: This is Nicoline Nwenushi Wazeh, a gender and development specialist, jurist, human rights defender and civil society activist in Cameroon. She is also the CEO and founder of Pathways for Women’s Empowerment and Development.
Nicoline: I have the mastery, I am a local expert. And I always tell my partner, I am a local expert, I go to the field, I know what is happening there. This thing is happening within a community where I was born and brought up in, I know exactly how the paradigms in this community have been shifted by the ongoing crisis.
Like I am coordinating a project that was audited last week. And the auditor was asking us things like the Hall that we used was too expensive.
But this is what actually happened. We go down to the field. The Anglophone crisis is fully ongoing. And we go down to the field to carry out a project on the localization of the women peace and security and the empowerment of women and youths. And to penetrate this community, we need first and foremost, to hold a pre-advocacy meeting with the administrative authority. That is not in the budget. But this is the only way that we can enter this community. You cannot enter this community without first meeting the administrative authority.
And we come to the administrative authority and the administrative authority suggest that we launched the project so that the traditional authorities and all the administrative authorities in this sub region are aware of our presence in this community. That is for our security, and in line with the humanitarian principle of do no harm.
And we communicate this to the partners that this is the process. We launched the project. And for the launch of the project, the administrative authority is clear, they use only one Hall, which is the Council Hall, for their security, because all the administrative, the Defense and Security offices, all of them that same in the same vicinity for security purposes. So they use only the Council Hall. The Council House is a Hall of about 250-300 capacity, right, and it has a unit price. But if you are using it to hold an event for 60 people, because of security issues, you have to pay the price, you have to pay the entire price of the Council Hall. They have only one sound system person that penetrates that secured space. Because any person coming out from that space with a sound system could just be carrying an explosive.
This is their protection mechanism. You don't want us to, to defy this protection mechanism, because they don't know or the international organisation has written on the project document what we have to do. This is just a tip of an iceberg of the project that I coordinate that was audited last week.
We were supposed to just copy and paste all that was written on the project. So when I look at this, I see the partnership has not been equitable.
For this project, the 20th May celebration in Cameroon has become very, very controversial, with the ongoing crisis. And when for this project in April, the administrative- everybody wants to draw the blanket to themselves, right? The administrative authority was trying to use this launch of the project to launch the 20th May activities. And if we did not have a mastery of this controversy, and allow them to do this, we will never ever put our foot in that community again. Because the non-state armed groups will take us for propagandas for government. So all of these things, we need to be able to navigate all of these things. And when we come when we succeed to navigate all of these things, and we come out successfully and safe. We expect our partners to be happy for us, they shouldn't be castigating us. They shouldn't be suspecting us, they shouldn't be treating us with with contempt and the type of disdain that some treat us with.
So these are my recommendations, please, mutual respect. Consider that know that we are grassroot experts. And we have a mastery of the situation on the ground and the capacity to navigate this situation, and be neutral and impartial and keep safe. And when we go to the field, we need to be flexible in order to be able to achieve the goals of the project.
You think about your money and your visibility, you don't think about our safety. You don't think about the safety of the people that we are going to meet. These people, grassroot people, they have been through a lot. They don't even want people to come and propose anything to them, because things that have been wrongly proposed to them have led them to more harm than alleviated the harm that the sufferings that they are facing.
Raaval: What Nicoline has raised here is so demonstrative of the problems we’ve heard other local experts have experienced. That there is a lack of trust towards local actors and a lack of respect for local expertise, for the context and for the community as a whole.
This lack of trust is rooted in White Supremacy and systemic racism—a belief that people in countries like the US and UK are superior and know better than those in countries like Cameroon or India.
It’s one thing not to trust your colleagues; it’s another to not trust them while holding disproportionate power over them. International funders and NGOs wield the most power in these partnerships, and this power imbalance has practical implications.
Nicoline: So yes, these partnerships need to be equitable, they need to give due consideration to the local context, especially when they are happening within a context of a conflict, like what we are facing in Cameroon. Please listen to us on the field, we are the experts, we know what is happening on the field. And we just want this thing to succeed for all of us. But for it to succeed, we shouldn't sacrifice the lives of our people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries.
Some international NGOs, they want that as they sit in their offices somewhere around the world, and write those projects, we should robotically copy them and paste on the on the ground without contextualising them ,without taking into consideration what are the needs of the people on the on the ground.
I’m talking about flexibility, some of them are very, very allergic to flexibility. When they say a project should be 123, it should be 123, there is like you don't have any right to adjust from those projects. And at the end of the day, they don't reflect our realities on the ground, they don't meet the needs of the purported beneficiaries of this project.
You cannot sit somewhere around the world in your air-conditioned office and design a project and you expect me to copy it and paste on the field within a conflict context, as if I were a robot.
Recently, when went down for one activity. The community people, they want to live together, they want community cohesion. Community cohesion is the strength of this community. And we asked them some of the things that they thought they could do for the, for them to live together for this community cohesion, because if there is cohesion in the community, they think they can maintain peace and fight against this violent extremism, for instance. They gave us their ideas. We don't always go there to assess what are their needs. They have assets, even their knowledge is their asset. And then you should allow us to be able to be flexible when we go down to the communities and they propose what they think is a priority for them.
Let's agree and shift the paradigms to meet their priority. So that what we are doing can have impact. It must not always be about our visibility. Because this is what most of these international NGOs are interested in. They're interested in their visibility, what about impact? So yeah I’m raising the issue of flexibility.
Respect should be at the core of any human relationship. We are partners, they're our technical partners. We just say, let there be mutual respect in the work that we are doing, let there be flexibility, let there be trust. I think they are just the same recommendations that we are making over and over and over again, facing the same challenges in different contexts. And making the same recommendation. There needs to be an alignment of the understanding – the understanding of the international NGO, and the understanding of the grassroots NGO. We need to give due consideration to the expertise of those working on the field. We need to know that we cannot copy and paste project activities without contextualising or tailoring them to the reality on the ground at the time of the implementation of the projects. And we need to know that local actors have a mastery of what is happening on the ground.
Raaval: As Nicoline pointed out, international NGOs and funders undermine the impact of their shared work by failing to trust their local partners.
Participants in our Transforming Partnerships consultation identified additional ways in which their international partners either granted or withheld trust and respect.
Funding emerged as a critical aspect – it’s the most visible and contentious part of partnerships. Inflexible funding programmes limit the role of local actors, preventing meaningful partnerships … and can force Global South civil society to "professionalize" to Western standards, creating inherently unequal, colonial power dynamics that reinforce White Supremacy.
Nicoline: At the end of the day, this thing is a give and take. It is not charity, nobody is doing charity for the other. Because when the international organisations write these projects, they have salaries for their staff, their salaries come from this project that they write. But when they subcontract this project to us, they don't know that we work in offices, they think that we stand on the streets and work. They don't even pay us partial rent for the offices. And when we look for where to remove a partial rent for the office, we are questioned on that. You don't buy equipment for our office. Normally, when we are implementing a project for an organisation, that organisation should provide us with equipment for that project. If we're implementing a localisation project with an organisation for three years, there should be able to be a desktop specifically in the office for that project, and some other document and some other instrument. You don't expect us to carry your project and put it in our old desktop and then when the desktop crashes tomorrow, you are asking us for documents. What did you provide us with to save the documents inside? You did not provide us with an instrument to save the documents inside? So these are some of the things that we are we are really it is a give and take, it is no charity, people should understand that they're not doing any charity by working with us. It is it is a win-win situation for both of us. Because if we are not on the ground to implement those projects, funders will not fund them knowing that they cannot go on the ground and implement the project. They are using us, they are leveraging on our local expertise to build those projects. And we want to be respected for that.
Partnerships cannot be equitable if we don't take all of these factors that we have just mentioned – if we don't trust one another, we don't mutually respect one another, we are not flexible in the work that we are doing. If we go to the work that we are doing like some robots, that work only according to the commands of the machine, the partnership cannot be equitable, because I'm working within a context. And that context, the interests of that country the interests of that beneficiary population should be paramount to the work that we are doing.
Raaval: Nicoline's reflections on funding bring to light the often unspoken but critical aspect of what it means to truly collaborate in a meaningful and equitable way. It's not enough to recognize the value of local expertise; that recognition must translate into tangible support. The idea that international partnerships are not acts of charity but rather mutually beneficial exchanges is crucial. However, the imbalance often lies in the assumption that local organisations can stretch their limited resources to meet the demands of these projects without adequate compensation or infrastructure.
Ultimately, by not trusting and respecting local leadership, we miss out on a better future for everyone. Because we miss out on the effective interventions of local experts. Let’s hear from Gunjan Veda, Executive Director of the Movement for Community-Led Development.
Gunjan: Growing up in India, right, I grew up in India, and I spent all practically all my life there till I moved out recently. It's amazing because on one hand, you see so much of deprivation, you see so much of poverty, you see so much of injustice, you see so much of discrimination. And yet at the same time, you just see the amazing spirit and resilience in the people.
I remember seeing you know, like, in a small village, in Rajasthan, in India, we went there and, and the school students, they had taken these, they would forage and find these used batteries. There was no electricity in their village after evenings, you know, so ironically, when you need electricity, they didn't have electricity, they only got electricity for a few hours in the morning. And this is, of course, a few decades ago. So now things have changed. But, and what they did was they would forage for these batteries, they connected them, and they connected to a bulb, and they had electricity in the evening. This is a group of 10- to 12-year-old students. Who haven't studied any of this, but they just realised what they needed. They foraged for what was available there was a town nearby batteries were just dumped all over the place, they would just connect them. And they found the solution. And to me, it's been remarkable, every single place I have gone to, I have seen how people have been able to just use their own knowledge, their own creativity, wisdom from long ago to just make changes, you know, into not just their lives, but the lives of those around them. And I find that fascinating because on one hand there is all these decades, right? We've been having millions and millions and millions of dollars which has been spent on solving people’s problems. And here are people who have no access to resources, they don't even have $1, forget millions of dollars and yet they have managed to solve their problems. Why is it that we are not investing here, in people? Why is it that we are still investing in creating a system that has not delivered?
Raaval: Let’s hear from Dr Véronique Barbelet now for some insights into what this lack of trust looks like for those in the Global North and how it hinders our work. Véronique is an independent humanitarian policy researcher and a Research Associate with the Overseas Development Institute’s Humanitarian Policy Group.
Véronique: I think, especially because of the work I do so working on humanitarian policy research, I see a lot of that inequity and racism and, neocolonial attitudes in knowledge production in the sector. And for me, that's been really difficult in the sense that I feel that as a white French woman who is associated with a very renowned Global North Research Institute, you know, I come in into a country where probably I've never been to and immediately I’m trusted. I know everything. I'm an expert, like, that's the perception people have of me. And I had this really interesting experience where I was actually subcontracted by Global South Research Institute, a national, you know, to do work within their own country. And I really accepted the work because I thought it was really interesting, like, oh, actually, that's interesting, I'm the one being subcontracted here, not the other way around. But it was a difficult experience, not because of my relationship with that Institute, I have a great relationship with them. It was really hard because of the relationship we had with the donor, the donor still thought I was leading the work, not the Director of that Institute, who is much more senior than me.
And then when we brought up issues around the fact that people we were interviewing on very sensitive topics, were really pushing back on having to sign consent, and on having to be recorded while interviewed. The donors said to us, oh but Véronique, you have to understand, if it was you conducting the interviews, that wouldn't be a problem, but it's your colleagues, your colleagues of that nationality, the Global South colleagues are conducting the research. So we need to make sure to record interviews for quality control. And that's the kind of attitudes that you will still see and experience in the work and that's, to me is the ways in which you see neocolonialism and racism still being such a big part of that knowledge production in our sector.
And how, again, as a person who probably has no contextual knowledge of that country, I'm immediately trusted whereas my colleagues who come from this country, probably much better placed to conduct interviews than me because they speak the language. They have the cultural understanding of how to approach people, especially on a sensitive topic. They're the ones who are distrusted.
And I think that's really shocking that we're still, in this day and age, experiencing things like this. And I still believe I have a lot to contribute to knowledge production in the sector. But I don't believe that I can do it without the diversity without that contextual understanding. And to still be faced with experiences like this, I find it quite shocking. And it means that we're still far in terms of that relationship between Global South and Global North and being and, and shifting power and shifting attitudes and changing attitudes, frankly.
Raaval: Véronique has really demonstrated that connection between systemic racism and distrust. Levels of experience and seniority were irrelevant to that funder. Just because the other researchers were from the Global South, they were not seen as trustworthy. And they were expected to put participants at risk, by recording them and capturing their data, just for the desires of this funder.
Nicoline: And we cannot go about exposing our people just because want to satisfy the exigencies of partners. That is not fair. It makes no sense.
Raaval: Exactly. We talked before about how doing things differently, more equitably, with greater mutual respect, is more beneficial and transformative for everyone involved. So, let’s hear what that looks like in practice from Véronique.
Véronique: For the longest time, Global South research collaborators were seen as just collecting, you know, there to collate the data.
It's really, really critical to do analysis with collaborators from the context, I found that also to be quite really, really useful. And it's probably one of the best parts of research I find when you sit down with researchers and you're like, Okay, we've been asking questions, we have all this data, and what does it mean? And to really work with people who know the context who know, sometimes they know the history of the people you've interviewed as well.
One of the greatest research experience I’ve had was one doing some research on the livelihoods of Central African refugees in eastern Cameroon. And to do this research, I actively sought to work with quite a diverse research team. So we had somebody who worked on education from a national NGO, Cameroonian NGO, somebody who had worked with an international NGO on livelihoods, but was also from Cameroon. We had a couple of people working with an ethnic minority interest organisation, that were the same ethnic group on both sides of the border between Cameroon and the Central African Republic. And then also a refugee from the Central African Republic, who was a refugee in Cameroon. So it was a really diverse team. And it was wonderful to work with these people. Because of the way they all approach the issue of refugee livelihoods and the livelihoods of the Central African refugees in Cameroon.
But what was interesting, and in my own biases, I, you know, I had some ideas of which one of the researchers had more experience doing research, and so what kind of data or quality of data we’d be getting from each one of them. And, you know, the data I used the most in the research in the end, was from the Central African refugee, who had never done research before. But his ability to understand and relate to the person being interviewed – we were doing life history interviews, so you really have to build a relationship with a person and they are long interviews, they can last two and a half hours, three hours. It was amazing the kind of evidence and data that he was able to get out. He didn't have any research experience, none, zero. And that shows you that how people you would think are maybe not fitting the criteria for a job, actually, because of their own experience because of other skills they have – the cultural understanding, the ability to build rapport, their human skills, maybe not technical skill, but human skills actually get you the best thing. So that's one of the experiences I had where, you know, given my own bias, I didn't think that would happen. And then I was really surprised. And that's when you get like that unconscious bias going back to your day, like, oh, you see.
Raaval: So how do we put these lessons into practice?
Véronique: I think generally on both sides, it is about that open communication, I would say, that's my first point. And my, first recommendation, and I'm sure there's nothing new but you know, creating safe space for dialogue where you can really talk to each other without fear. And I think that's how do you create that safety that not fearing, because obviously, one of the biggest issues and going back to the example I was mentioning, when I was subcontracted by Global South institution, one of the reasons why they were putting up with the kind of attitudes that they were facing by the donor was because they really needed the contracts for their survival. And the fact that they still felt they had to play the old game to be able to continue having access to resources. So they took all the insults and the racism and the neocolonial interactions and attitudes, because at the end of the day that would be needed to survive. So yeah, creating that safe space is so critical.
And I think when I was thinking about, well, how do you create safety, and I think it's a little bit like when you think about inclusive management and inclusive leadership, it's about telling the other person that you value them that would they say is actually critical and important, that you wouldn't be able to do your work without them. That their experience and their expertise is extremely valuable and important to you.
And I think the more you do that, the more the safer the space becomes for them to feel like well, actually, I do have an added value here. They do recognise this, so maybe I can say, when you did this, that didn't work for us, because this is what it made us feel or this is the consequences of that contractual aspect.
The other one, which I mentioned, and I think it's less about how Global South institutes change their mindsets, but about Global North Institute's making sure that it's easier, I think, for Global South institutes to collaborate with Global North institutes, if the Global North Institute is very clear about the added value, and saying we think the added value we have in this process, or in this activity, or in this programme, or in this research, is this. Is this something that we complement? What skills and expertise or knowledge and networks you already have? If yes, should we work together?
So I think by being really clear about as a Global North actor, about what you think you bring to the table, and recognising that you don't know everything, but that this is one thing that you can bring, and maybe this is something that the other side feels that actually that would be great. If we work together, we could complement each other.
And the other, the other one for me in terms of really moving forward. And that's something that the Humanitarian Policy Group at the ODI has been working on, and I think that's one of the biggest issue with knowledge production is who sets the agenda, the research agenda. And I think at the moment, at least, my experience, with the ODI is we're very powerful. And we're very much able to set the research agenda when actually, maybe we are not the ones who understand what policy issues or practice issues are critical to those living in contexts and affected by the crises we're researching.
And so one of the things that the Humanitarian Policy Group has been doing is working more strategically with a Global South Research Institute, and come up with a research agenda that was based on the context, on a very specific context, and on what they saw as being the critical question to answer and setting that agenda.
And that's my last point is then the ODI’s Humanitarian Policy Group is there to obviously contribute in it's an analytical skills and knowledge and expertise and expertise, but also to lend a platform of privilege and power. And to be able to say, Well, no, this is not just any Global South institute that is maybe not going to be listened to, we're able to kind of extend our position of privilege and position of power and say, we support this, we're behind this, we work collaboratively on this. And then hopefully, the more we do this, and the more the rich, the humanitarian policy research agenda will be set not in London or in Geneva, but, you know, in the Central African Republic and in Congo and in South Sudan. And that, I think, for me will be very transformational. And, and really great and inspirational and transform, like, changing the sector.
Raaval: As we wrap up this episode, it's clear that the themes of respect and trust – or the lack thereof – underpinned by White Supremacy are at the heart of many of the challenges faced by local experts in their partnerships with international organisations. The expertise and contextual knowledge of local actors are invaluable, yet too often disregarded.
This disrespect is not just a matter of individual interactions but it is deeply rooted in systemic racism and power imbalances that permeate the development and humanitarian sectors.
We've heard about the tangible consequences of this lack of respect and trust – from rigid project designs that don't consider local realities, to the undermining of local experts' authority and safety. The call for mutual respect, flexibility, and genuine partnership is not new, but it remains as urgent as ever.
As we move forward, it's essential that international organisations reflect on their practices and strive to build truly equitable partnerships. This means not just listening to local experts but trusting them – trusting them to lead and recognising the power dynamics at play.
Take a look at the shownotes for today’s action pack, which we hope will help you on your journey to decolonise. And look out for our next episode, where we’ll take this conversation one step further, delving into the issue of inclusion – of local experts and of those with minoritised identities. I hope you’ll listen in.
For now, it’s been a pleasure to host you on The Problem with Partnerships. Take care.